Coached HR · A Brad in HR program
Your office manager already runs HR. They were never trained for it.
Coached HR trains the person already in your office, gives them a real system to run it on, and keeps me on call for the situations that need an HR executive. You don't have to hire an HR person to have real HR.
30 minutes · No hard sell · Rio Grande Valley, in person
Your best employee gets hurt on the job. Or asks for leave you've never processed before. Or comes to you about something another employee said.
Who handles it? If the honest answer is "whoever's free that day," you already know where this is going.
A real one
A real story
The first week of my first real HR job, I opened a filing cabinet and found a stack of I-9s that were mostly blank. Not partially filled out. Blank. Names at the top, nothing else.
I spent the next month tracking down employees one by one to complete them. When I got to the bottom of it, I found out a few didn't have valid work authorization. I had to let them go.
Nobody had done anything malicious. There was no HR person in the room to catch it. It was just a filing cabinet nobody had looked in.
of small business employees have worked somewhere with no dedicated HR person.
The pattern
The pattern
It's not that owners don't care. HR lands on whoever's already in the room: an office manager, a bookkeeper, an owner wearing one more hat. Nobody sits them down and says here's what you need to know.
That's not a training failure.
It's a training absence.
From here, two ways this goes
Piece it together, or build it once.
The default path
Figure it out as you go
- A workshop here, a template there
- Late-night searches when something goes wrong
- Policies copied from the internet, never adapted
- Hoping the gaps stay quiet
Coached HR
Built once, correctly
- A 20-year HR executive builds it with your person
- A real system, not a binder on a shelf
- An advisor on call when something real happens
- What they learn stays in your building
A newer version of the same trap
ChatGPT can draft a policy. It can't stand behind one.
A growing number of small business owners have quietly made ChatGPT their HR department. It's fast, it's free, and it sounds confident. That confidence is exactly the problem.
It doesn't know what it doesn't know
It only answers the question you ask it. If you don't know I-9 re-verification exists, it won't tell you that either.
It's generic by default
Employment law changes state by state, sometimes city by city. A general model wasn't built to track your latest wage notice or leave mandate, and it will still answer confidently either way.
It's not accountable
In a DOL audit or a lawsuit, "I asked a chatbot" isn't a documented compliance process. Someone still has to sign their name to the decision.
It's not private
Pasting real employee details, medical information, or investigation notes into a public AI tool creates its own exposure.
I build AI tools for a living. mycoachr, my own AI-powered manager coaching app, is one of them. AI is a good tool for HR. It's just not an HR department, and not a substitute for someone trained enough to know which questions to ask. That's the difference between having AI and being Powered.
One Bootcamp. Three ways to stay backed.
Every tier builds on the last.
Everyone starts with the same 30-day Bootcamp. From there you choose how much stays behind your person.
Tier 1 · The foundation
Trained
- 30-day HR Bootcamp, in person and online
- They build your system while they learn it
- Your handbook and the full written library
- mycoachr for the person doing the work
Tier 2 · Adds
Trained and Backed
- Everything in Trained
- I am who they call when it gets serious
- You reach me directly, not a ticket queue
- We go through your HR records once a month
Tier 3 · Adds
Trained, Backed and Powered
- Everything in Backed
- mycoachr for your whole management team
- Every manager gets the same coaching, not just your HR person
- The hard conversations get handled the same way everywhere
Don't have someone to train yet? That's a different conversation. See fractional HR leadership and project work →
The real risk
It's a matter of when, not whether.
Small businesses carry more of this exposure than larger ones, not because they take more risks, but because nobody's job is to catch it first.
small businesses will face a lawsuit, at an average cost of $54,000. Six in ten face it without a lawyer already engaged.
federal penalty per willful FLSA minimum-wage or overtime violation in 2026, with criminal prosecution possible on repeat offenses.
potential fine per I-9 violation. The fines stack, and most small businesses are still running this process on paper.
Level one
Not sure where your HR stands?
Take the free HR Framework Audit and get a clear picture of where your business is exposed and where you're solid. Takes under 10 minutes. No signup required.
100% confidential. Built specifically for RGV employers.
Common questions
Questions about Coached HR
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Let's build it once.
Coached HR is currently available to businesses in the Rio Grande Valley, in person, with plans to grow from here. A 30-minute discovery call costs nothing.